Legal technology innovator, and Legal Futures Associate Peppermint Technology, is first to offer a fully collaborative telephony communication ‘app’ for its Legal Service Platform. The app is an example of Peppermint’s vision to bring together applications, content and collaboration tools in one platform to enrich the client experience, improve fee earner effectiveness and reduce costs.

This latest Peppermint platform app, to be released from the Peppermint app shop, is a Microsoft technology and replaces a traditional telephony system with a unified communication tool. The app provides presence (someone’s availability), audio and video telephony, audio and video conferencing, instant messaging and perhaps most impressive of all service is the ability to share documents and your desktop real-time online.

Improve Fee Earner Effectiveness

The app transforms the internal working of a law firm. Staff can instantly see the location of colleagues (eg. Office, Home, Court) and their availability (eg. On a Call, Away, Busy, In a Meeting), using a colour-coded interface. This enables them to choose, without any delay or latency, the most effective way to communicate. They can make a call, video call, send an instant message or even drag and drop attendees into conference calls without the need for issuing dial-in numbers. (see image 1)

The colour-coded presence icons are consistent throughout Microsoft Office where staff can look at their colleague’s availability from an email header then click on their name to initiate communication, and also from within the Peppermint Legal Service Platform. (see image 2)

Staff can make and receive calls from their computer wherever they are in the world. This extends the working capability of home workers and removes the cost of expensive additional home telephone lines. Numbers can be diverted to any other phone, including a mobile, making staff accessible wherever they are.

Reduce Costs

Using this communication platform between different offices and remote workers removes incurring long distance charges and negates the need for telephony switches and telephony hardware, including physical phones. Staff simply need a headset or can divert the call to any other phone. The integrated audio, video, and web conferencing helps reduce travel costs as well as any costs of third-party conferencing solutions.

Arlene Adams, Peppermint CEO commented,

“Communicating effectively is at the heart of providing excellent legal services and this App provides lawyers with the tools to do just that. At Peppermint we practice what we preach and I can personally vouch for this smarter way of working and its cost effectiveness. In our office telephony costs are minimal, you will not see a single phone but staff productivity has soared.”

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Back in the day, when I entered the legal profession, an age of the Telex and elephantine batteries operating mobile phones, most articled clerks, as they then were, eyed achieving equity status. That was expected.